Moreover, Tolkien did not begin with a list of characteristics of children’s literature; he
began with a story he was telling his son at bedtime.
Thus Tolkien began with the tale itself. Numerous critics have commented on the
structural similarities of the plots of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as if that were
a defect in Tolkien’s writing (see Helms 1981, Nitzsche 1979, and Petty 1979); but what
they usually fail to note is that Tolkien’s plot structure is the structure of the Märchen
or magic tale, the legend and the epic. Folk-lore and mythology scholarship has
repeatedly shown that traditional stories share traditional characteristics, and Tolkien
wanted to tell a traditional story. Unlike the tales he had studied, which were in
existence in oral tradition long before they were written down, the tales he published,
with the exception of the early parts of The Hobbit, were written down without a specific
pre-existing orality.
Some of Tolkien’s sources, however, lie in the traditional stories from pre-Christian
northern Europe and are easily traceable. The names of the dwarves come directly from
Sturluson’s Prose Edda, wherein the inquisitive reader will discover, among other
things, that Gandalf means ‘sorcerer elf’. The dragon, Smaug, with his soft underside, is
very like the Midgard Serpent, the dragon in Beowulf, and Fafnir, in The Volsunga Saga;
and Bilbo’s theft of Smaug’s cup is reminiscent of a similar scene in Beowulf. Beorn, the
shape-changer, also comes from Scandinavian legend and folk-tale. Dain’s reputation as
a generous lord and Fili and Kili’s death protecting Thorin can both be traced to
Scandinavian prototypes. Gandalf’s role as wizard and guide for Bilbo may be patterned
after Merlin’s similar role in the Arthurian stories and more generally based on the
Celtic druids. The traditional hero of the story, Bard, certainly takes his name from
Celtic sources and his role in the novel from the traditional hero tale. And there is much
more.
Tolkien’s use of these obvious Scandinavian and Celtic materials does not make his
tale derivative, however. In The Celts, Gerhard Herm describes the education of a Bard
or Druid and notes that the Bard had to learn ‘all of the old stories circulating that the
public invariably wished to hear again and again, in the same traditional form’ (1979:
239). Tolkien would have known, from his own studies of the ancient tales, that the
traditional story-teller was not inventing new stories but retelling old ones, that the art of
the story-teller was not, like that of the modern novelist, in inventing something new but
in re-telling something old and re-telling it very well. Tolkien took the traditional materials
he knew, including the dragons which had held his attention since childhood, and retold
them as The Hobbit. What Tolkien was able to do was to call on a lifetime’s study of
northern European languages, histories, legends, mythologies, literatures, and the like;
to simmer them together until the whole was distinct from the origins as well as greater
than the sum of its parts; and to synthesise a cohesive secondary world for his high
fantasy which was both original and resonant with the echoes of hundreds of years of
pre-Renaissance European culture—especially the Celtic and Scandinavian sources
which have influenced so much post-Tolkien high fantasy (Sullivan 1989).
The reader who moves from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings moves from a novel
with a single plot and a limited number of characters to a novel with several plots and
an enormous number of characters, from a novel which follows the folk-tale format quite
closely to a novel which has the folk-tale format as its base but also contains much of
HIGH FANTASY 307